I would argue that it is fair for those who want and receive benefits to pay the cost of them, rather than those who do not want nor receive those benefits.
However, that wasn't my point. The OP made the argument that government-run utilities like water and sewer are pretty much 100% good. I was providing an anecdote that you can, in fact, get screwed over if you end up on the wrong side of them. Just like you said - government means paying for stuff you don't need. That doesn't mean you can't try to minimize how much you're paying for what you don't get.
It really depends on the property and how far you are from the road. A localized septic system can be essentially right out back from the house. Mine was relatively expensive to put in because of local soil conditions - around $10k for the whole system, including a new tank. For me personally, it would probably be $5k-ish to connect to the county system - I would have happily done that instead of ripping up the whole backyard if I could have done it to begin with.
However, some of my neighbors live nearly a mile away from the main road, which is where the sewer system would be put in. I don't even want to think about how much it would cost them to tap into it. I have heard in other projects of it being upwards of $20k in some specific bad cases.
I'll always say - upgrades in infrastructure are good, forced upgrades are bad. I'm sure quite a few of my neighbors whose systems are getting up there in age would much prefer to tap into a county system instead of replacing their own. I would have if I had the option when I moved in. If they add it five years from now and require tap fees, though, I'm going to be screwed.
Oh, no, I definitely understand that there is a benefit to centralized sewer systems. I would love it if they tell me that I can keep my system until it wears out and then connect to the new lines. I have heard of some townships doing just that, which generally works but can occasionally cause some strangeness if something minor breaks in the system. Most of the time, though, the towns want to recoup their building costs as quickly as possible, so the connection fee is mandated.
And my local township is fighting against running lines and mandated fees, but we've got about 1200 people total in it, and so don't have a whole lot of pull with county government.
My point was, though, that if this is a private upgrade to infrastructure (such as when they finally got DSL out here) I have to option to purchase it or not as I prefer, given my current situation. If the government rolls out fiber, they are completely able to require you to pay $60 a month (in direct fees or indirect taxes elsewhere) whether you were happy with your $15/month dsl or not.
I think about my municipal water and sewage service all the time. It's actually a real concern that I might get them.
You see, I live in the country, and paid quite a bit when I bought my house to put in a new septic system that should last me 30-50 years. However, the nearest city recently (against the wishes of anyone nearby) decided to put in a new water treatment plant a few miles down the road. Not close enough to really bother me, thankfully, but close enough that they might want to run lines to my house.
That's great, right? Government at work, getting better sewage system out to the country.
If the county runs sewer in front of your house, you are *required* to pay to be attached. That means thousands to tens of thousands of dollars of direct costs that you are required to pay, regardless of whether your current system still has 30 years of life on it, and for no real direct benefit to you.
Government-run utilities can do good things, provide good services, all that. But it's still government, and there's still a "must" attached to it that can really screw you over if you're caught on the wrong end of their plans.
I thought the main reason was that it takes years to train a longbowman and minutes to train a musketeer?
Rate of fire, accuracy, and distance were all superior for a longbow, the training and strength required to draw one was a biproduct of a very specific lifestyle that only existed for a short period of time historically.
I think most of the problem with CGI is that filmmakers trust it too much.
Take the Burly Brawl scene in The Matrix: Reloaded. Amazing CGI work for most of the fight. Then they go to slow motion and you can see every mistake in plain view.
If you did most CGI effects the same way they generally do them with models (bad lighting, odd angles, quick cuts) you'd never know it was CGI.
Oddly enough, it's often the camera-work that gives it away. Some films are finally going away from this, but there's still a very stereotypical CGI camera movement that just doesn't feel natural.
Well, that and the constant presence of over-animated impossible robotics. Old robots felt so much more realistic when they actually had to be driven by something to work instead of having random pieces pop out everywhere with no support structure.
The intelligent people realize that there is a stigma attached to not having a degree, and therefore will get one so they don't have to fight their way through proving themselves separately at every job.
You're conflating two separate issues. NPR has a measurable liberal bias, but it's still generally quality, educated news. They don't tend to make shit up, or have a "youtube comments" equivalent section.
Publications like NPR or Reason are intentionally biased - but they're at least generally well-informed and factual, it's the base premise the authors are using and the conclusions they draw from the facts that is biased. It'd be awesome to have a source that is both quality and unbiased.. but I haven't found one.
CNN's twitter segments aren't usually particularly biased... but that doesn't make them any higher quality.
Actually, I think the article inked here the other day on cooking and evolution seemed to argue that recent studies show that 150 calories from a Twinkie is NOT eating 150 calories from oatmeal. Your body will, in fact, get less overall calories from the oatmeal than from the very processed and easy to digest twinkie.
That's the extra benefit you describe, but people need to realize that it isn't some magic process - you just either can't use as much of the energy in the oatmeal, and you burn more energy digesting it, so the actual calorie input (in terms of what gets into your body) is reduced.
Even farmed out, this will cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. I completely agree that it would be a *good* thing for Sony to do. But they should definitely not be legally *required* to do it, and more importantly, this asshole should not be entitled to any cash because they didn't do it in the first place.
I would say that Mature in this sense also deals with a deeper degree of complexity in themes and gameplay.
Halo or Call of Duty have violence and gore and whatnot.. but they also have much more complicated controls and a deeper learning curve, and to a large degree a deeper gameplay than, say, Mario Galaxy. Mario is a great game - don't get me wrong - but the difference in what you can accomplish in it five minutes after you pick up a controller versus 20 hours later is not particularly great. It is a simple game.
Additionally, aside from violence, there is a darkness to most mature games that you don't see on the wii. People die and lives are at stake - you have stories of post-apocalyptic worlds (fallout 3) or of an immigrant trying to make it in a new city through a life of crime (GTAIV), or even occasionally something as dark and deep as Bioshock. These are more mature themes than save the cartoony princess from the cartoony bad guy, or make your gimpy little avatar go bowling.
Everyone bemoaning the fact that "mature" means "sex and violence" is just being a dick - there's a lot more these games than that that is almost completely missing on the wii.
Sin City is a more mature movie than Toy Story, whether you think it's a better movie or not, it's appealing to something different, and that something isn't just a puerile "ooh, boobies"
Labor supply for things like this are very local. In the fast food industry, at least, all workers are on the books and making the normal wage for anyone applying for that job - they are all pretending to be legal. I'm pretty sure most places would prefer to hire people who speak English if they're available.
Someone who just lost his white collar job doesn't just go apply at McDonald's, though. They live off of savings and unemployment until those run out while they're looking for another white collar job. Flipping burgers isn't going to make the difference on their mortgage payments. I expect the recession to eventually lead to more competition for low income jobs, but from what my friend's seen at his location, they aren't applying yet.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's similar to self-defense law. You have the ability to help someone else who is the victim of a crime, but you have no obligation to do so beyond your own morality. I fail to see how this would be any different a day before someone commits a crime than during the commission.
I know some people who work in fast foods and hire a fair number of immigrants. Why? At the amount is he allowed by management to pay them, he can't get Americans with a work ethic to apply for the job. But it keeps the hamburgers cheap.
Anyway, first time he got a bad Soc card (I think they actually mis-spelled security on it) he brought it to his boss and asked him what to do about it. Boss said "I'm not trained in identifying legitimate social security cards, are you?" and told him to put down that they presented him with a card.
Another time someone's ID got hit by a random check and was found to be bad. They hired him back the next day when he came back with a better card.
There would have to be so much more government oversight than there is currently to actually have a chance of stopping this. And even then:
Fast food wages would have to increase drastically to get people to work there (not saying it's entirely a bad thing, but it has consequences, such as..). Food prices would increase to match. A lot of good (but illegal) people would be out of work. My friend doesn't hire people just because they're cheap - he's looking for good people who are solid workers, same as any employer. Our large portions of our economy built on cheap labor would collapse. We lost full-service gas stations when they implemented minimum wage laws. A lot of the bottom end of our economy would fall out.
I'm not saying that this is a good situation - I'm saying it's the situation we have right now with illegal immigration. Personally I think we could fix 90% of the problems if we just let the damn people immigrate legally. I have another friend who is trying to get citizenship - even as a college-educated person with an upper-middle class job (ie, not someone walking across the border with no job and few prospects) it will take her between seven and fourteen years. Do people honestly think that people would pay thousands of dollars to smugglers, risk their lives and possessions to sneak across the border to work at a fast food joint if standing in line were a reasonable option?
As an interesting note - my friend is losing a lot of his Mexican workers soon. The DMV introduced much more stringent ID requirements to be able to renew a license plate. Since most of them want to lay as low as possible - they have valid plates and most of them have accident insurance - not being able to get a valid plate is causing them to move on to other states that aren't as strict.
Of course, it doesn't help that for the most part instead of trying to integrate with the new leadership of the country, Palestinian leadership left the country and immediately started plotting the demise of their new rulers. Their arab neighbors weren't exactly a help - instead of integrating them into their own society, they kept them in refugee camps for years while promising that Israel would soon be destroyed so they could go home. The whole thing is a giant fuckup.
Meh, I've seen people write bad code from both disciplines. It really comes down to what the individual's background is and how much they decide to care about low level stuff. If you're doing business logic and database code, you'll never have to care about any of this, and you won't pay attention in the one required class that mentioned it.
Of course, adding to this whole problem is the fact that low-level problems like this are a) much less likely to be the cause than your own mistakes and b) sometimes are fairly hard to quantify. Even if you know some of what you're doing, there's a big step between "I think this might be caused by a precision issue" and knowing exactly how big of a problem can be attributed to precision, and which calculations are affected by it. In one project I worked on, we had a visual jitter for months that we just assumed was us pushing against the limits of our available precision (storing locations in meters as floats on a state-sized map) that turned out to be another calculation altogether. Knowing something exists and knowing how big it is are very different problems.
It definitely doesn't help that until I was in high school I thought an "engineer" was "someone who drives a train." Scientists (often of the somewhat mad variety) exist in our youth culture, but the engineers who sit down and turn ideas into products are for some reason never mentioned as possible career choices when you're a kid. Science to a kid means lab coats or digging up dinosaur bones.
Not that it changes much when you grow up... to a fair number of people I don't do anything more specific than "work with computers."
I'm often sort of curious what the average background of most immigrant workers like that are. Do people with years of masonry experience pick up and head to the US to seek their fortunes or is it more just a bunch of young guys who can follow directions?
Look, that doesn't mean that government doesn't have a role in trying to equalize things - rules to protect consumers from false advertising or dishonest contracts, for example, benefit everyone. Nor should congress encourage the success of one company over another. There will always be class and power imbalances, and there are times that government can help correct these issues - we can argue what those times are all day.
But anyone sitting in front of a consumer PC, one of the greatest examples of what free markets can produce in history, going "wah, capitalism is evil" needs a bit of perspective.
The danger here is ceding legitimate control of the internet to the FCC.
Look, I'm all for some form of net neutrality. I think that ISP's are treating their customers like crap, and the openness of the net is part of the core that allows so much innovation.
HOWEVER, if you give someone authority to regulate it because you agree with one stance, they can make regulations you disagree with as well.
The last chair of the FCC was very big on indecency standards on TV. If the FCC can say what services ISP's are allowed to sell, why can't they say what content they are allowed to sell as well? I think this is a reason for concern, and the EFF agrees with me. Imagine what the net would look like if everyone had to pay thousands of dollars in fines if they printed an expletive, like they do on television today. I'm not saying it'd go that far, but there's cause for some concern. The FCC rarely loosens its control once it gains it.
Yes, some libertarians are taking the stance that corps should be able to do whatever they want, but a fair number are more concerned about what else the FCC can do with this power. There's some thought here beyond "corporations are good, har har"
Yes, one can't place any of the blame for our current society, where one of the biggest problems facing the lower class is an overabundance of cheap food, complex electrical equipment made from components brought from all corners of the earth is available for a few minute's work, and loudmouths who are not of the aristocracy have enough economic stability to sit on their butts and debate these things, on capitalism and free markets at all. Surely all of these innovations occur daily in those socialist utopias the world has produced year in and year out.
Corporations may exist for profit, but their ability to extract profit from the underclass is the only reason that technology is available to you and me, and not just some hobbyhorse for the rich.
We just hired three new people straight out of school. I also know several managers in the service industry who are hiring all the time. I personally got laid off from my job in February and found a new one that paid better in three months. The bad economy is an excuse - there's always some job available for those willing to work, it just may not be the one you wanted.
Look, I get the whole follow your dream thing. I got lucky that my dream pays ok, but not everyone gets that. My dad quit his management job after 10 years to become a professional musician. The *first* thing he did, even before he started looking for gigs, was to sign up for a temp agency to do physical labor if he couldn't find enough work as a performer. There's no reason you can't at least beat out a high school kid for a job at wendy's or a clothing store.
SOME women are offended by these things. SOME women find them amusing, or have no real opinion.
Now... that doesn't mean that if you want to attract those women to an event, you shouldn't do things that will offend them. But that's universal logic, not something specific to half-naked women.
Slashdot Mirror
I would argue that it is fair for those who want and receive benefits to pay the cost of them, rather than those who do not want nor receive those benefits.
However, that wasn't my point. The OP made the argument that government-run utilities like water and sewer are pretty much 100% good. I was providing an anecdote that you can, in fact, get screwed over if you end up on the wrong side of them. Just like you said - government means paying for stuff you don't need. That doesn't mean you can't try to minimize how much you're paying for what you don't get.
It really depends on the property and how far you are from the road. A localized septic system can be essentially right out back from the house. Mine was relatively expensive to put in because of local soil conditions - around $10k for the whole system, including a new tank. For me personally, it would probably be $5k-ish to connect to the county system - I would have happily done that instead of ripping up the whole backyard if I could have done it to begin with.
However, some of my neighbors live nearly a mile away from the main road, which is where the sewer system would be put in. I don't even want to think about how much it would cost them to tap into it. I have heard in other projects of it being upwards of $20k in some specific bad cases.
I'll always say - upgrades in infrastructure are good, forced upgrades are bad. I'm sure quite a few of my neighbors whose systems are getting up there in age would much prefer to tap into a county system instead of replacing their own. I would have if I had the option when I moved in. If they add it five years from now and require tap fees, though, I'm going to be screwed.
Oh, no, I definitely understand that there is a benefit to centralized sewer systems. I would love it if they tell me that I can keep my system until it wears out and then connect to the new lines. I have heard of some townships doing just that, which generally works but can occasionally cause some strangeness if something minor breaks in the system. Most of the time, though, the towns want to recoup their building costs as quickly as possible, so the connection fee is mandated.
And my local township is fighting against running lines and mandated fees, but we've got about 1200 people total in it, and so don't have a whole lot of pull with county government.
My point was, though, that if this is a private upgrade to infrastructure (such as when they finally got DSL out here) I have to option to purchase it or not as I prefer, given my current situation. If the government rolls out fiber, they are completely able to require you to pay $60 a month (in direct fees or indirect taxes elsewhere) whether you were happy with your $15/month dsl or not.
I think about my municipal water and sewage service all the time. It's actually a real concern that I might get them.
You see, I live in the country, and paid quite a bit when I bought my house to put in a new septic system that should last me 30-50 years. However, the nearest city recently (against the wishes of anyone nearby) decided to put in a new water treatment plant a few miles down the road. Not close enough to really bother me, thankfully, but close enough that they might want to run lines to my house.
That's great, right? Government at work, getting better sewage system out to the country.
If the county runs sewer in front of your house, you are *required* to pay to be attached. That means thousands to tens of thousands of dollars of direct costs that you are required to pay, regardless of whether your current system still has 30 years of life on it, and for no real direct benefit to you.
Government-run utilities can do good things, provide good services, all that. But it's still government, and there's still a "must" attached to it that can really screw you over if you're caught on the wrong end of their plans.
I thought the main reason was that it takes years to train a longbowman and minutes to train a musketeer?
Rate of fire, accuracy, and distance were all superior for a longbow, the training and strength required to draw one was a biproduct of a very specific lifestyle that only existed for a short period of time historically.
I think most of the problem with CGI is that filmmakers trust it too much.
Take the Burly Brawl scene in The Matrix: Reloaded. Amazing CGI work for most of the fight. Then they go to slow motion and you can see every mistake in plain view.
If you did most CGI effects the same way they generally do them with models (bad lighting, odd angles, quick cuts) you'd never know it was CGI.
Oddly enough, it's often the camera-work that gives it away. Some films are finally going away from this, but there's still a very stereotypical CGI camera movement that just doesn't feel natural.
Well, that and the constant presence of over-animated impossible robotics. Old robots felt so much more realistic when they actually had to be driven by something to work instead of having random pieces pop out everywhere with no support structure.
The intelligent people realize that there is a stigma attached to not having a degree, and therefore will get one so they don't have to fight their way through proving themselves separately at every job.
You're conflating two separate issues. NPR has a measurable liberal bias, but it's still generally quality, educated news. They don't tend to make shit up, or have a "youtube comments" equivalent section.
Publications like NPR or Reason are intentionally biased - but they're at least generally well-informed and factual, it's the base premise the authors are using and the conclusions they draw from the facts that is biased. It'd be awesome to have a source that is both quality and unbiased.. but I haven't found one.
CNN's twitter segments aren't usually particularly biased... but that doesn't make them any higher quality.
Actually, I think the article inked here the other day on cooking and evolution seemed to argue that recent studies show that 150 calories from a Twinkie is NOT eating 150 calories from oatmeal. Your body will, in fact, get less overall calories from the oatmeal than from the very processed and easy to digest twinkie.
That's the extra benefit you describe, but people need to realize that it isn't some magic process - you just either can't use as much of the energy in the oatmeal, and you burn more energy digesting it, so the actual calorie input (in terms of what gets into your body) is reduced.
Even farmed out, this will cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. I completely agree that it would be a *good* thing for Sony to do. But they should definitely not be legally *required* to do it, and more importantly, this asshole should not be entitled to any cash because they didn't do it in the first place.
I would say that Mature in this sense also deals with a deeper degree of complexity in themes and gameplay.
Halo or Call of Duty have violence and gore and whatnot.. but they also have much more complicated controls and a deeper learning curve, and to a large degree a deeper gameplay than, say, Mario Galaxy. Mario is a great game - don't get me wrong - but the difference in what you can accomplish in it five minutes after you pick up a controller versus 20 hours later is not particularly great. It is a simple game.
Additionally, aside from violence, there is a darkness to most mature games that you don't see on the wii. People die and lives are at stake - you have stories of post-apocalyptic worlds (fallout 3) or of an immigrant trying to make it in a new city through a life of crime (GTAIV), or even occasionally something as dark and deep as Bioshock. These are more mature themes than save the cartoony princess from the cartoony bad guy, or make your gimpy little avatar go bowling.
Everyone bemoaning the fact that "mature" means "sex and violence" is just being a dick - there's a lot more these games than that that is almost completely missing on the wii.
Sin City is a more mature movie than Toy Story, whether you think it's a better movie or not, it's appealing to something different, and that something isn't just a puerile "ooh, boobies"
Labor supply for things like this are very local. In the fast food industry, at least, all workers are on the books and making the normal wage for anyone applying for that job - they are all pretending to be legal. I'm pretty sure most places would prefer to hire people who speak English if they're available.
Someone who just lost his white collar job doesn't just go apply at McDonald's, though. They live off of savings and unemployment until those run out while they're looking for another white collar job. Flipping burgers isn't going to make the difference on their mortgage payments. I expect the recession to eventually lead to more competition for low income jobs, but from what my friend's seen at his location, they aren't applying yet.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's similar to self-defense law. You have the ability to help someone else who is the victim of a crime, but you have no obligation to do so beyond your own morality. I fail to see how this would be any different a day before someone commits a crime than during the commission.
I know some people who work in fast foods and hire a fair number of immigrants. Why? At the amount is he allowed by management to pay them, he can't get Americans with a work ethic to apply for the job. But it keeps the hamburgers cheap.
Anyway, first time he got a bad Soc card (I think they actually mis-spelled security on it) he brought it to his boss and asked him what to do about it. Boss said "I'm not trained in identifying legitimate social security cards, are you?" and told him to put down that they presented him with a card.
Another time someone's ID got hit by a random check and was found to be bad. They hired him back the next day when he came back with a better card.
There would have to be so much more government oversight than there is currently to actually have a chance of stopping this. And even then:
Fast food wages would have to increase drastically to get people to work there (not saying it's entirely a bad thing, but it has consequences, such as..).
Food prices would increase to match.
A lot of good (but illegal) people would be out of work. My friend doesn't hire people just because they're cheap - he's looking for good people who are solid workers, same as any employer.
Our large portions of our economy built on cheap labor would collapse. We lost full-service gas stations when they implemented minimum wage laws. A lot of the bottom end of our economy would fall out.
I'm not saying that this is a good situation - I'm saying it's the situation we have right now with illegal immigration. Personally I think we could fix 90% of the problems if we just let the damn people immigrate legally. I have another friend who is trying to get citizenship - even as a college-educated person with an upper-middle class job (ie, not someone walking across the border with no job and few prospects) it will take her between seven and fourteen years. Do people honestly think that people would pay thousands of dollars to smugglers, risk their lives and possessions to sneak across the border to work at a fast food joint if standing in line were a reasonable option?
As an interesting note - my friend is losing a lot of his Mexican workers soon. The DMV introduced much more stringent ID requirements to be able to renew a license plate. Since most of them want to lay as low as possible - they have valid plates and most of them have accident insurance - not being able to get a valid plate is causing them to move on to other states that aren't as strict.
And if they do, they come on a visa and go to college most of the time anyway.
Of course, it doesn't help that for the most part instead of trying to integrate with the new leadership of the country, Palestinian leadership left the country and immediately started plotting the demise of their new rulers. Their arab neighbors weren't exactly a help - instead of integrating them into their own society, they kept them in refugee camps for years while promising that Israel would soon be destroyed so they could go home. The whole thing is a giant fuckup.
Meh, I've seen people write bad code from both disciplines. It really comes down to what the individual's background is and how much they decide to care about low level stuff. If you're doing business logic and database code, you'll never have to care about any of this, and you won't pay attention in the one required class that mentioned it.
Of course, adding to this whole problem is the fact that low-level problems like this are a) much less likely to be the cause than your own mistakes and b) sometimes are fairly hard to quantify. Even if you know some of what you're doing, there's a big step between "I think this might be caused by a precision issue" and knowing exactly how big of a problem can be attributed to precision, and which calculations are affected by it. In one project I worked on, we had a visual jitter for months that we just assumed was us pushing against the limits of our available precision (storing locations in meters as floats on a state-sized map) that turned out to be another calculation altogether. Knowing something exists and knowing how big it is are very different problems.
It definitely doesn't help that until I was in high school I thought an "engineer" was "someone who drives a train." Scientists (often of the somewhat mad variety) exist in our youth culture, but the engineers who sit down and turn ideas into products are for some reason never mentioned as possible career choices when you're a kid. Science to a kid means lab coats or digging up dinosaur bones.
Not that it changes much when you grow up... to a fair number of people I don't do anything more specific than "work with computers."
I'm often sort of curious what the average background of most immigrant workers like that are. Do people with years of masonry experience pick up and head to the US to seek their fortunes or is it more just a bunch of young guys who can follow directions?
Open Scene Graph is also heavily utilized by a lot of military sim software.
I know in my old government contractor job we used and contributed to probably ten or fifteen different open source projects.
Look, that doesn't mean that government doesn't have a role in trying to equalize things - rules to protect consumers from false advertising or dishonest contracts, for example, benefit everyone. Nor should congress encourage the success of one company over another. There will always be class and power imbalances, and there are times that government can help correct these issues - we can argue what those times are all day.
But anyone sitting in front of a consumer PC, one of the greatest examples of what free markets can produce in history, going "wah, capitalism is evil" needs a bit of perspective.
The danger here is ceding legitimate control of the internet to the FCC.
Look, I'm all for some form of net neutrality. I think that ISP's are treating their customers like crap, and the openness of the net is part of the core that allows so much innovation.
HOWEVER, if you give someone authority to regulate it because you agree with one stance, they can make regulations you disagree with as well.
The last chair of the FCC was very big on indecency standards on TV. If the FCC can say what services ISP's are allowed to sell, why can't they say what content they are allowed to sell as well? I think this is a reason for concern, and the EFF agrees with me. Imagine what the net would look like if everyone had to pay thousands of dollars in fines if they printed an expletive, like they do on television today. I'm not saying it'd go that far, but there's cause for some concern. The FCC rarely loosens its control once it gains it.
Yes, some libertarians are taking the stance that corps should be able to do whatever they want, but a fair number are more concerned about what else the FCC can do with this power. There's some thought here beyond "corporations are good, har har"
Yes, one can't place any of the blame for our current society, where one of the biggest problems facing the lower class is an overabundance of cheap food, complex electrical equipment made from components brought from all corners of the earth is available for a few minute's work, and loudmouths who are not of the aristocracy have enough economic stability to sit on their butts and debate these things, on capitalism and free markets at all. Surely all of these innovations occur daily in those socialist utopias the world has produced year in and year out.
Corporations may exist for profit, but their ability to extract profit from the underclass is the only reason that technology is available to you and me, and not just some hobbyhorse for the rich.
We just hired three new people straight out of school. I also know several managers in the service industry who are hiring all the time. I personally got laid off from my job in February and found a new one that paid better in three months. The bad economy is an excuse - there's always some job available for those willing to work, it just may not be the one you wanted.
Look, I get the whole follow your dream thing. I got lucky that my dream pays ok, but not everyone gets that. My dad quit his management job after 10 years to become a professional musician. The *first* thing he did, even before he started looking for gigs, was to sign up for a temp agency to do physical labor if he couldn't find enough work as a performer. There's no reason you can't at least beat out a high school kid for a job at wendy's or a clothing store.
SOME women are offended by these things. SOME women find them amusing, or have no real opinion.
Now... that doesn't mean that if you want to attract those women to an event, you shouldn't do things that will offend them. But that's universal logic, not something specific to half-naked women.